Ukraine war

The war in Ukraine and the prospect of continuing and even intensifying tensions in Russia's relations with the West have strongly affected its foreign policy priorities. The "Look East" Strategy, which has historical roots in Russian foreign policy and has been more seriously pursued by the Kremlin since the second half of the 1990s and especially in the last decade, has become the dominant approach in Moscow's foreign policy. In fact, after the war in Ukraine, Russia has no choice but to go east. In this situation, the question is how the war in Ukraine will affect Russian policy toward the Middle East and Iran. What changes will happen in Russia's foreign policy regarding this region? It seems that parallel to the dominance of the "Look East" approach in Russia's foreign policy, the Middle East will also find a more strategic position in the country's foreign policy priorities. After the war in Ukraine, Russia will need to maintain and strengthen relations with the Middle East countries especially Iran much more than before in order to reduce the consequences of the political and economic pressures of the West. The methodology of this research is descriptive-analytical and the method of data collection is the library. In this regard, books, articles, documents, and Internet resources have been used to collect data.

When the war broke out in Ukraine, this eastern European country started a successful resistance that pinned down the Russian army in many regions and created a stalemate that has sparked a war of attrition not only in Ukraine, but also on social media territories in other political spheres. This study investigates the way in which Ukraine war is represented -or to be more precise, fought- in the Iranian X. Data mining methods were employed to search, find and extract posts including “Ukraine war” -or “جنگ اوکراین” in Persian. Our main question was, how did Iranian X users position themselves with regard to war in Ukraine? Using Python, a popular social media research tools, 2027 relevant posts were extracted to show the way in which Iranian users position themselves with regard to Ukraine war. Results revealed that the two Iranian main political factions  -namely Reformists and Fundamentalists- see this war not as a war of other countries, but that of their own. The pro-Western Reformists favor the Ukrainian side of the war and the pro-Eastern Fundamentalists favor the Russian side of the war. They fight on social media as though the Ukrainian war is their own war.